Religion as an Invention
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Sunday, August 23, 2026 16:07
VIEWED: 9267
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Quote:How do you define "God" for the purposes of the question? Does the Force count as God? What about the "Spirit of the Earth and Nature" or "Collective Consciousness"?
Originally posted by Hero:
The answer to your all your questions comes down to one fundamental issue...does God exist?
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Quote:
Originally posted by canttakesky:
How do you define "God" for the purposes of the question? Does the Force count as God? What about the "Spirit of the Earth and Nature" or "Collective Consciousness"?
The original question is essentially 'is religeon necessary'?
He did not ask about a particular one, but the answer is the same.
Simply put, without God religeon is meaningless.
H
"Hero. I have come to respect you." "I am forced to agree with Hero here."- Chrisisall, 2009.
"I would rather not ignore your contributions." Niki2, 2010.
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Hello,
Thank you all for commenting.
I'm not sure religion requires God, and I've never been able to figure out why God requires religion.
--Anthony
Assured by friends that the signal-to-noise ratio has improved on this forum, I have disabled web filtering.
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Quote:
Originally posted by AnthonyT:
Hello,
Thank you all for commenting.
I'm not sure religion requires God, and I've never been able to figure out why God requires religion.
--Anthony
Assured by friends that the signal-to-noise ratio has improved on this forum, I have disabled web filtering.
Anthony,
Well said. Taoism does not require a God.
KPO,
I think that it is possible for members of a religion to *believe* a falsehood, but not for religion itself to be a falsehood. It appears to exist.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
There's a lot of wisdom in the words of prophets, which is why people follow them. If you sat kids down with Jesus, Mohammed, Gautama, Lao Tzu, et al collectively, they'd probably do even better.
I would define such things as philosophies.
Quote:
Taoism does not require a God.
Taoism, like other branches on the Buddhist tree, is a philosophy.
What reason had proved best ceased to look absurd to the eye, which shows how idle it is to think anything ridiculous except what is wrong.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Hero:
Simply put, without God religeon is meaningless.
Perhaps, but then, define God - the word "Kami", for example, encompasses far more than our western word for Diesms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kami
-F
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Frem,
Agreed, completely.
PR,
Philosophies are things followed by those who understand them. No leap of faith is ever required. You could bend the rules to extend philosophy into religion by calling all religion existential philosophy, but to cull the field of religion down to a narrow judeo-christian tradition is to do a disservice to both disciplines.
Also, Taoism is not a branch of Buddhism. It's not just that Lao Tzu was older than Siddhartha Gautama, though they were contemporaries, but Buddhism didn't take off as a religion until centuries later, and Taoism had already been a religion for centuries when Lao wrote the Tao te Ching. Huangdi references the Tao in the 27th c. BC, including Fi Xi's 29th c. BC texts, and the texts which later join the I Ching appear as sacred Taoist texts in the 22nd c. BC, but it doesn't become the major religion of China until the 12th c. BC.
What Lao did, when asked specifically for his thoughts on the Tao, was to set forth a path for people seeking enlightment. It was a curious manner to take, because more religious texts give you answers, and the Tao te Ching is much more ponderous. It's intended to start you thinking in the right direction, which does have something in common with some hindu ideas.
Pre-Lao Taoism is much more mystical. The forces exist and a path exists but there's really now a well defined way to reach this enlightment, and a lot of superstition and mysticism is involved in trying to understand these things, which is not uncommon in other religions. If as a religion it seems more scientific and less superstitious, that might be because it's 5 millennia old, and has evolved over time. Early Christianity and Judaism were also intensely mystical and superstitious. Today's christians, (some of them) are able to much more clearly define the ideas and will of Jesus and rely often on first and second hand accounts of his life, and the origins of his ideas, as well as his own words, the connections with El-hebrew faiths and zoroastrianism, and the origins of biblical texts in the assyrian, egyptian and babylonian. Compare that 21st century take with christianity of the 16th, 11th, 6th and 1st century, which were heavily superstitious. In the middle ages they were still burning heretics and going on crusades (okay, maybe some of them still are) and in the early centuries they were relying on people who claimed that they were channeling Jesus in seance-like trances as the literal will of God.
As for divinity, the concept is similar to the Japanese, as a balance of natural forces rather than controlled will of deities that would imply a God.
In a western mindset, the Taoist "God" if it were to be so transferred would be one somewhat indifferent towards the stuggles of humans, but such an application would show a pretty weak understanding of the underlying concepts.
I'm not all that familiar with Buddhism. I wouldn't be astounded if some similar concepts show up, as both Taoism and Hinduism had been around is the 3rd millennium BC and so were bound to have influence all the regional cultures.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
Philosophies are things followed by those who understand them.
I disagree entirely. Philosophy is simply the pursuit of truth. Much as the Tao is the Way to becoming awakened, so too are all philosophies the Way of pondering existence to gain understanding. Conclusions may be drawn, but to say that a philosophy can only be followed by one who already understands it is to lock down the entire field of thinking. The inherent difference is that philosophies encourage growth and personal thinking, while the majority of organized religion does no such thing. Religions preach and lay down laws where philosophies ask questions and invite contemplation. Philosophies may be mistaken for organized religion, but they are not. For example, anyone who says that the Buddha was a god or should be an object of worship has no idea what they're talking about. The Awakened One was a teacher, leading by example. That's the whole bloody point; anyone can achieve what he did. Praying to Buddha to deliver you to Enlightened Paradise, for example, goes against everything he ever stood for, which was that we should find our own way. "Believe nothing. No matter where you read it, or who said it, even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense." It's a philosophy. More, it's a practice. It might have some wiggle room in the definition of 'belief system,' but it was never meant to be a religion. Anyone who treats it as such is entirely ignorant of it.
What reason had proved best ceased to look absurd to the eye, which shows how idle it is to think anything ridiculous except what is wrong.
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"Richard Dawkins suggests in The Selfish Gene that cultural memes function like genes in that they are subject to natural selection. In The God Delusion Dawkins further argues that because religious truths cannot be questioned, their very nature encourages religions to spread like "mind viruses".
This model holds that religion is the byproduct of the cognitive modules in the human brain that arose in our evolutionary past to deal with problems of survival and reproduction. Initial concepts of supernatural agents may arise in the tendency of humans to "overdetect" the presence of other humans or predators (momentarily mistaking a vine for a snake). For instance, a man might report that he felt something sneaking up on him, but it vanished when he looked around.[11]
Stories of these experiences are especially likely to be retold, passed on and embellished due to their descriptions of standard ontological categories (human, artifact, animal, plant, natural object) with counterintuitive properties (humans that are invisible, houses that remember what happened in them, etc.). These stories become even more salient when they are accompanied by activation of non-violated expectations for the ontological category (houses that "remember" activates our intuitive psychology of mind; i.e. we automatically attribute thought processes to them).[12]
One of the attributes of our intuitive psychology of mind is that humans are interested in the affairs of other humans. This may result in the tendency for concepts of supernatural agents to inevitably cross connect with human intuitive moral feelings (evolutionary behavioral guidelines). In addition, the presence of dead bodies creates an uncomfortable cognitive state in which dreams and other mental modules (person identification and behavior prediction) continue to run decoupled from reality producing incompatible intuitions that the dead are somehow still around. When this is coupled with the human predisposition to see misfortune as a social event (as someone's responsibility rather than the outcome of mechanical processes) it may activate the intuitive "willingness to make exchanges" module of the human theory of minds resulting in the tendency of humans to try to interact and bargain with their supernatural agents (ritual).[13]
In a large enough group, some individuals will seem better skilled at these rituals than others and will become specialists. As the societies grow and encounter others, competition will ensue and a "survival of the fittest" effect may cause the practitioners to modify their concepts to provide a more abstract, more widely acceptable version. Eventually the specialist practitioners form a cohesive group or guild with its attendant political goals (religion)."
A rather interesting explaination, I thought.
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PR,
You are essentially attacking one religion here, and its splinter religions. Collectively those religions count 1/3 of the planet or so as adherents, but a much smaller portion of that as strict adherents that would fall into the nature people have described here as controlling, etc. That said, most of the world belongs to a religion.
Yes, sure, you can philosophically understand the Tao, but that doesn't mean half a billion followers do, and it doesn't mean you can't do the exact same thing with the words of Jesus Christ.
I agree that there are difference, and that they trend in the direction you're talking about, but I think that those who are member of a religion trust in the underlying truth in a way that those who read a philosophy do not, and are perhaps more skeptical of.
One exception that comes to mind is Ayn Rand. Most of those who read it seem to either reject it or accept it, and if they accept it, trust the conclusion in a religious manner.
On the other side, you could say the exact same thing about Scientology, myself and those like me excepted, which is to say, I read and took the parts I wanted, but many people become adherents to a religion.
Now, you could have scientologists who were outside of the CoS, heretics as it were, or whatever you call those christians and wicca who don't belong to an organization, self-practitioners, phooey, the word escapes me.
Another way of putting it is "Religion is a whole life philosophy, to be accepted in its entirety by its followers"
In the way that someone like Nietzsche isn't.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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